The following week a letter arrived from outside. It said Bulgarian had died in hospital, and his brother had tried asking the Siberians for justice but they had turned him down flat, so he had started threatening vengeance, at which point they had killed him by knocking him down with a car. He had tried to run away from his murderers, but hadn’t succeeded. To remove any doubt a Siberian belt had been left next to the corpse.
And so the war had ended. Nobody sought revenge any more, and everyone kept quiet and behaved themselves. Some other Little Thieves arrived in our cell a few months later, but they didn’t make any more mistakes.
For nine months I was in that place, in that cell, in the Siberian family. After nine months they released me for good conduct, three months early. Before leaving I said goodbye to the boys; we wished each other good luck, as tradition requires.
After I left, for a long time I kept dreaming about the prison, the boys, that life. Often I would wake up with a strange sense that I was still there. When I realized I was at home I was happy, certainly, but I also felt a mysterious nostalgia, sometimes a regret that remained in my heart for a long time. The thought of no longer having any of my Siberian friends around me was an unpleasant one. Gradually, though, I resumed my life, and the faces of those boys became ever more distant.
Many of them I never heard of again. Years later, in Moscow, one day I met Kerya Yakut, who told me a few things about some of them, but he too no longer moved in those circles; he was working as a private bodyguard to a rich businessman now, and had no intention of returning to the criminal life.
He seemed to be in good form. We talked a little, reminiscing about the times of our Siberian family, and then we parted. Neither of us asked for the other’s address; we were part of that past which is not remembered with pleasure.
Ksyusha
Ksyusha was a very beautiful girl with typical Russian features. She was tall, blonde, shapely, with freckles on her face and eyes of a dark, deep blue.
She was the same age as me, and she lived with her aunt, a good woman whom we called Aunt Anfisa.
Ksyusha was a special friend of mine.
I remember the day I first saw her. I was sitting with my grandfather, on the bench. She was walking towards our house with her slightly timid yet at the same time strong and decisive step: she seemed like a wild animal padding through the woods. When she approached, my grandfather looked at her for a moment and then said, as if speaking to someone I couldn’t see:
‘Thank you for sending another angel into the midst of us sinners.’
I realized that she was a ‘God-willed’ child, as our people say, one who in other places would simply have been called mad.
She suffered from a form of autism, and had always been like that.
‘She has suffered for us all, like Our Lord Jesus Christ,’ my grandfather told me. I agreed with him, not so much because I understood the reason for Our Lord’s suffering, but simply because I had learned that in my family, in order to survive and have some chance of prospering, it was essential always to agree with Grandfather, even in cases which exceeded the limits of the intellectual faculties, otherwise no one would get anywhere.
Since my childhood I had been surrounded by handicapped adults and children, such as my close friend Boris, the engine driver, who met the tragic end that I have already described. Many mentally ill people lived in our area, and they kept coming to Transnistria until the 1990s, when the law against keeping the mentally ill at home was abolished.
Now I realize that Siberian culture developed in me a profound sense of acceptance towards people who outside my native society are described as abnormal. But for me their condition was simply never an anomaly.
I grew up with mentally ill people and learned many things from them, so I have come to the conclusion that they have a natural purity, something you cannot feel unless you are completely freed of earthly weight.
Like many God-willed children and adults, Ksyusha was a frequent visitor to our house: she entered and left whenever she wanted; sometimes she stayed until late at night, when Aunt Anfisa would come to fetch her.
Ksyusha was expansive, and could be positively garrulous. She liked to tell everyone the latest news she’d managed to gather.
She had been brought up by the criminals, so she was aware that the cops were the baddies and the people who lived in our district the goodies, and that we were all one family.
This fact had created an atmosphere of protection around her, and she felt free to live her life as she wanted.
Even when she was older, Ksyusha continued to come into our house as freely as before: without asking anyone’s permission she would start cooking whatever she liked, or she would go out into the vegetable garden to help my aunt, or stay indoors to watch my mother knitting.
Often she and I would go up onto the roof, where my grandfather kept his pigeons. She liked the pigeons very much; when she saw how they walked about and ate, she would laugh and stretch out her hands, as if she wanted to touch them all.
Together with my grandfather we used to fly them. First Grandfather would take a female pigeon, small and poor of colour and feather, and throw her; she would start to rise into the air, and would fly higher and higher, and when she became as small as a dot in the sky Grandfather would pass one of us a big strong male with a rich, glossy plumage, an absolutely beautiful pigeon. At Grandfather’s signal we would throw this second, larger pigeon upwards, and he would rise towards the female, turning somersaults in the air to attract her attention. He would beat his wings hard, making a sound like the clapping of hands. You should have seen how Ksyusha laughed at that moment; she was the real beauty.
She liked to imitate Grandfather’s gestures and phrases. When she saw a handsome new pigeon she would put her hands on her chest just as Grandfather Boris did, exactly like him, and in a tone of voice identical to his she would say, as if she were singing:
‘What a miracle of a pigeon this is! It has descended straight from God!’
We would all burst out laughing at the way she succeeded in catching Grandfather’s manner and the peculiarities of his Siberian pronunciation; and she would laugh with us, realizing that she had done something clever.
Ksyusha didn’t have any parents, or any other relatives; her aunt wasn’t a real aunt – she let herself be called that for simplicity’s sake. Aunt Anfisa had a past as a klava or zentryashka or sacharnaya: these terms in criminal slang denote a female ex-convict who after her release settles down with the help of the criminals, finds a normal job and pretends to live an honest life, so as to deflect the attention of the police from herself. To criminals in difficulty – guys on the run from the police, say, or escaped convicts – such women are a means of support in the civil world; it is thanks to them that they communicate with their friends and obtain help. These women, who are clean and above all suspicion, are highly respected in the criminal world and often run secondary criminal affairs, such as black marketeering or selling stolen goods. According to the criminal law they cannot marry, because they are and must remain the brides of the criminal world. The former USSR is full of these women: people say of them that they haven’t got married because they had some bad experience with men in the past, but the truth is different. They live in isolated spots, outside town, in quiet areas; inside their apartments there is no trace of that world to which they are closely and inextricably linked. The only visible sign of their identity might be a faded tattoo on some part of the body.